For the sake of argument, let us pretend Durbin is not full of it.

Let's think for a moment here. Durbin can compel anyone in the country to show up and testify on national television.

Is the decision REALLY "Well if Alito doesn't show up, what am I supposed to do???"

https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1792721946456768604

You could bring in some great lawyers explaining why Supreme Court Justices aren't considered above the law. You could bring in some charismatic smart person to lay out all the corruption. You could call for him to resign.

I mean, how dense does Durbin think we all are?

If you live in the orange lines of this map (2/3 of the population), you are considered in the border zone.

Inside it, Border Patrol can set up checkpoints anywhere, stop anyone under “reasonable suspicion”, and other insane stuff most people think is illegal.

https://twitter.com/ronbrownstein/status/1792261788257636425

No new laws need to be passed to abuse this even more than it is.

Trump already did so while in office. Does anyone remember when he sent DHS into Portland and they didn’t identify themselves and kidnapped people and stuffed them into unmarked vans?

Yeah that happened.

Just because we don't think we see it much, I'll give my take on why so many senators are being silent on important issues from their perspective.

This is less a corruption story and more a personal relationships, culture, and power story. Aka: how a Senator might see it. 🧵 We talk about Durbin. But you piss off the number 2 Senate Democrat, you get frozen out of stuff. It's just how it works. There are complex ways to override that but for Durbin its easy given his power and for a random member, it's a huge commitment.

An example to illustrate:

By far the most shocking part of my Senate career was seeing how at the top levels of the Democratic Party, all the data driven strategy I kept hearing about was totally bs and composed of grifters who could confidently state whatever they want with pseudoscientific handwaves. 🧵 I will never forget the first social media strategy presentation I ever sat in on. Will not name names but the person was in charge of a huge number of strategic decisions for the party.

I still have the presentation.

Oh great, so now can we all demand Biden change course because of his awful poll numbers now?

Or is it still the Dem position that polls aren’t real life too?

Or those ceasefire calls every office has been getting at 99-1 ratios. And all your mail? That’s fake too right?

https://twitter.com/AJentleson/status/1782763005408604568

Seriously this stuff drives me nuts. It’s all real! It needs context but it’s real.

If Adam wants I could give him several examples of very concrete policy changes that I watched occur in the Senate because of Twitter and show evidence.

As promised @RoKhanna, this is my second thread calling you out. This time for your relationship with Elon Musk despite Elon systematically turning Twitter into a safe haven for nazis.

I thought a good place to start is a tweet from 2 days ago. Weird right? What does it mean?

https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1775271563128123557

By my count, Elon's tweeted that 17 times and as far as I can see, received zero press coverage. To the untrained eye, it is just another strange, bizarre thing that Elon has said.

But I am Jewish. My grandfather is a holocaust survivor. I know what this is.

Debated how to respond because yes, its nice to have a member of congress say something like this.

And in other posts he defended things in ways I strongly disagree with, but still gave my posts a wider platform.

What's the takeaway for speaking to truth to power?

https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1775419773930930238

The most important thing is that if you are willing to face consequences and understand them in advance, yes...do it. There are many times dumb things happen and its because people around an important person were too afraid to say something. Dissent is good.

As promised: will now tell a sitting member of the U.S. Congress why I called him a phony. And while there is much to discuss, I will focus on the most clear cut: his corrupt stock trading and how he is using clever tricks to make it look like he is against it but is not.

https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1775271563128123557

I have expertise on this topic because while the office I worked for will be not thrilled I am talking about this, I worked for one of the biggest stock traders in the Senate. And while I didn't witness anything personally, I have a sense of how reform is stopped with tricks.

So I know only a few people are going to report or care about the Supreme Court ruling today on how government officials can run their social media accounts but it has insanely bad implications for our democracy.

As I was a digital director in the Senate, this is my wheelhouse. Basically it’s a bit less strict than I expected and says that government officials cannot mute or block commenters on social media platforms for most things.

Never mind that the owners of these social media companies can freely block any of those commenters for any reason.

I sat in many silly poll briefings while I worked on the Hill. We had polling about health care and bipartisanship and blah blah.

Absent from these poll briefings were such questions as

"Is being a nazi bad"

"Do you prefer leaders who don't like executing military generals" They didn't poll it because we all know the answer but also there is this cultish believe that "real people" don't care about that stuff.

For some reason they only care about Dems talking about priorities like health care. This is such bs.